There is no 'I' in 'Team'

Being a small business owner doesn't mean you have to everything yourself, if you want your business to grow, you can't do it all yourself.

Firstly, I'm no business guru. If the truth be told, I'm a complete novice. However I'm a fast learner, and my brief time in business so far has taught me some valuable lessons. One of which, is that I really can't do everything myself, I don't need to do it all myself and not doing it myself, is actually really good for business.

As people and businesses who know me and my business, we are in the process (yes, still in the process thanks to the disaster that is called BT) of moving to a new office. This office will give us much needed space, but more importantly, business will need to increase and this can't be done by me alone.

I've bought some nice whiteboards and made a big list of all the things I don't want to do, I don't need to do and what I should avoid. This means if I can get other people to do these tasks, they still get done, I have more time, which will in turn generate more business and keep me sane.

"You have to work 24/7" "No you don't"

I've always been a fan of quality, not quantity. For those of you reading this thinking I should be doing eighteen hours a day because I run my own business, think again. There is no need for this, that just isn't healthy for anyone. With the right setup, you can be more productive, in less time and spend more time enjoying yourself.

One of the first things on the list is bringing in someone to look after the general bookkeeping and raising invoices. This can be very time consuming, and I don't particularly enjoy it. The great news is that there is plenty of people out there who love doing this, so they will be brought it to help me with this.

Next up is general admin. Things like scanning paperwork, pruning our CRM system and tidying up our paperwork and data. Again this is highly time consuming, so it will be shipped and dealt with by someone else from now on. This gives me more time to spend bringing in new business and servicing existing customers. It's a win win situation.

Sure, all of these things cost money, but what cost to me if I didn't delegate these tasks? I would be surely run into the ground eventually and I do value my social time. The weekend is the weekend, and although I do the odd piece of work over the weekend, I would prefer this to be preparing solutions, software and hardware for the week ahead whilst listening to Five Live over a nice cup of The Earl.

To be honest, this post is my own self help. Once something is in writing, I tend to stick to it, so this has been well worthwhile.

And now for something completely different (or is it?)

Last week we managed to stop our bad run of form in the 6-a-side league and won 2-0. The bad news is that we face the team top of league tonight, so it's going to be tough, but with a little team work, you never know....